The Forgotten Girl (Lynn Rivers Mysteries, Book One)

Chapter 2

2

The lump in Lynn’s throat as she walked back to her car and waited for Cindy to answer her call grew exponentially with each ear-splitting ringtone. When it was finally time for her to speak, she almost couldn’t.

“Did you find her?” Cindy asked in a ghost-like voice, devoid of color and any real inflection.

Her voice cracked and she couldn’t go on.

“Meet me at the Sheriff’s Office in Anchortown,” Lynn said. “You can’t miss it. It’s to the left of Main Street as you enter the town center. How far out are you?”

Cindy conferred with Roy. Lynn couldn’t hear the words, but the deep bass of his voice reverberated in her chest.

“We’ll be there in twenty minutes,” Cindy said and Lynn let her go.

The news she had to impart couldn’t be told over the phone. And especially not while they were driving. But she still felt very small and cowardly as she hung up to get an ETA from her partner, TJ Leigh. She briefly explained what she already knew about the case, then asked him to arrange a forensics team and notify their medical examiner, then meet her at the campground.

He didn’t ask unnecessary questions, he never did, just told her it’d be done and hung up. They’d known each other since the academy days and worked undercover together. Now they had been partners for the last six months or so, ever since they were forced to stop working undercover and became just run-of-the-mill field agents. She was also technically a profiler, which had been her chosen career path when she first joined the Bureau. But that was before she fell into undercover work and finally found herself. Or lost herself, depending on how you looked at it.

She had felt more alive and more herself assuming different personas than she did as Lynn Rivers and as the years passed, it only became more apparent. Especially now that she was being forced to live as herself all the time. But that was a problem that she’d successfully buried in the deepest recesses of her mind where she never went willingly, and she certainly wouldn’t start today. Though a part of her mind craved the luxury of the sort of detachment she could get when she was playing a role, cried and screamed for it.

She parked in front of the squat, gray concrete single story Sheriff’s Office building. The parking lot was empty. Not surprising since all the deputies were at the camp. Across the street was a 24/7 diner and the scent of coffee rose strongly from it, accompanied by the rich aroma of deep-fried food every time someone opened the door to enter or leave.

Lynn had chugged a cup of coffee before leaving her Manhattan apartment this morning, but that was hours ago now. She’d had nothing to eat yet, but the rumbling in her stomach wasn’t due to hunger. Anything she ate today would forever be tied to the gruesome scene she had just left and she had no appetite. Coffee wasn’t a necessity either. Nothing was. Except going back out there and catching whoever hurt Shanna.

She started shivering again before she saw Roy and Cindy’s dark maroon Lexus approaching, the same color as the blood covering Shanna’s face and clothes. Thinking that didn’t help with the shivering caused by dark and immutable memories flooding her mind. She needed to be a hundred percent there for her friends now. And for finding Shanna’s killer. Later, once it was all done, she could fall apart. And she very likely would.

Burying herself first in schoolwork and then actual work had always been how she got through the most difficult situations. How she got through her life. And she longed now to just get to it.

Cindy’s face was ashen grey despite the tan she’d acquired during her Cabo vacation, and Roy’s eyes were more red than white. His hands were shaking so hard he dropped his keys while getting out of the car. They had always been the most vibrant people Lynn knew, but both looked every bit their sixty-two and sixty-four years, respectively, this morning.

“What is it?” Cindy asked shakily as she approached, a tear escaping out the side of her left eye.

Lynn’s eyes watered too, but she ignored it.

“Let’s go inside,” she said and led the way into the Sheriff’s office where Tara was already holding the door open for them.

They followed her into a brightly lit room with two plush grey sofas arranged in an L-pattern against the walls, a coffee table and a large Ficus in the corner, which Lynn assumed was plastic. This room was probably used as a soft interrogation room, and none of the furniture inside it looked like it was used much. It was the perfect choice for what was coming.

“Let’s sit,” Lynn said. “Please.”

Roy helped Cindy by holding onto her arm as she lowered herself onto the larger of the two sofas. Lynn took a seat on the other one. As she expected, the cushions still held all the firmness of being new and unused. This being a very small town in a very rural county, Lynn was fairly certain that this murder was the worst thing to have happened here in decades. Just like her best friend’s murder and then her parents’ deaths had been the worst thing to have happened in her hometown in over thirty years.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Roy said in his rich bass voice, the Harlem accent of his youth thick. “Just tell us.”

He had started from nothing and worked hard to get to where he was—a partner at one of New York City’s most prestigious law firms.

“This morning, Shanna’s body was found at the camp where she was staying,” Lynn said, her voice getting more and more choked up with each word she spoke until it was just a croak. But it was best to just say these things. There was no nice way of saying them. “I’m so sorry.”

Cindy wailed and hot tears filled Lynn’s eyes, but they didn’t spill and she ignored them.

She took Cindy’s hands and squeezed. “I’ll find who did this. I’ll find him and he will pay.”

As she stepped back out into the cool autumn morning, Lynn had only a very vague recollection of the rest of their conversation. She’d tried to ask them questions about Shanna’s life, but it was too painful for all of them.

So all she really knew was that her heart had been ripped out and not replaced. She also knew that she had a promise to keep. And she would keep it.

* * *

The thick light grey clouds ringed with dark blue had overpowered the sun again by the time Lynn returned to the camp. This time, she parked near the main entrance, which was only a short walk from the dining hall and reception area. A walk along a well-kept, wide gravel walkway lined with a fence made with a rope tied to wooden poles stuck into the ground. The canopy overhead wasn’t as thick as elsewhere in the camp, but it still wasn’t thin enough to keep the oppressive midday darkness at bay.

She used to love the woods, loved the eerie mists and greyness that came with approaching Halloween especially, along with every other form they took in the changing seasons, but now she hated them and there was nothing to be done about it. The last thing she needed now was to dwell on it.

The dining hall was a sprawling, one-story log cabin with a slanted roof and small windows dotting the sides, several of them open. The building had no porch, only a wooden awning over the entrance. She could hear people conversing inside as she approached, speaking in low, hurried tones, interspersed by louder, more screeching sounds as people periodically lost their cool and became aware of what was happening.

A single deputy was standing just to the side of the awning, smoking a cigarette, his black jacket zipped-up, his shoulders hunched. But he straightened his back as she approached and the vacant, lost look in his eyes turned to something harder. Lynn was used to men reacting to her in a certain way.

With her long, golden-brown hair, upturned blue eyes and lean hourglass figure she didn’t try to hide, men noticed her. She had used that to her advantage in undercover work.

Work with what you got. Use it. Everyone else will. One of her earliest mentors had told her that—a woman in her sixties who had been with the Bureau since the inception of the criminal profiling department.

Truth was, Lynn was only comfortable using her looks that way when she was someone other than Lynn Rivers. But she faked it well. She could fake anything well. It was something of a superpower. She introduced herself and showed him her badge.

“Are you Deputy Walsh?” she asked and he nodded.

She judged that he was in his early to mid-thirties, mainly because there were no crow's feet lines around his eyes though his dark brown hair was peppered with grey.

“I’d like to speak to the victim’s friends,” she said. “Are they inside?”

He nodded again and tossed his cigarette on the ground, crushing it with his boot. Then thought better of just leaving it there, and picked it up.

“Sorry, it’s been a long morning,” he said in a gravelly voice, fixed his bloodshot eyes on her and grinned. That took years off his face.

She grinned too, but just barely. “No worries, I’m not the litter police. You did the initial interview with her friends, didn’t you? What did you make of them? Anything strike you as odd?”

Walsh pulled out a spiral bound reporter’s pad and flipped back a few pages. “I spoke to a Jake Hornby and Alicia West. He was the one who reported the victim missing and she’s his girlfriend. He’s the film director and she does the lights. At first, they were annoyed at being woken up early, then shock took over. From what I could gather, they didn’t know the victim very well.”

Hearing the name Alicia jolted Lynn and she barely heard the rest of what he said. That was her best friend’s name—the friend’s whose body she stumbled on in woods much like these on that cold autumn dawn. But that was another time. Another life. Not that this one was much better today.

“How many people were working on this film?” Lynn asked. “Three sounds like it’s not enough.”

Walsh consulted his pad again. “Eleven, all told. There was also a sound guy, a script supervisor who doubled as a second actor, a makeup artist, a couple of cameramen and an assistant. They didn’t know the victim at all before coming here.”

“Just eleven people to make a movie?” Lynn said, looking around at the trees, a strange sensation that she was being watched from the darkness under the canopy a prickling ball in the pit of her stomach. She likely was being watched. There was no shortage of curious people amid the trees.

“What were they filming? Some sort of horror flick?” she added as she turned back to Walsh.

He gave her a how did you know sort of look and cleared his throat. “Yes. That’s how understand it.”

“I’d like to speak to them,” she said. “Are they all inside?”

Walsh opened the door and leaned inside, scanning the interior. Then he stepped back and held the door for her.

“They’re at the end of the room, right by the fireplace,” he said. “I should remain out here to make sure no one leaves before giving their statement.”

That seemed like an a*s backwards way of going about getting witness statements—you go to them, you don’t wait for them to come to you—but Lynn didn’t argue.

Rural law enforcement more often than not had their own way of doing things, and that’s why they always needed all the help they could get. Seeing them work now, makes her doubt even more that this county, and this Sheriff’s Office had investigated a murder this brutal in living memory. Though NYC wasn’t so very far away, so maybe she was wrong.

The interior of the log cabin smelled of natural wood, smoke from countless years of fires burning in the huge fireplace dominating one of the side walls of the building, and coffee. A large, mesmerizingly bright fire was burning in the fireplace now, reminding her of yet another reason she loved autumn, and winter for that matter. That sense of coming in from the cold to a cozy, fire-warmed room had to be one of her favorite sensations in the world. But this room today remained chilly. Probably because about half of the small windows were wide open.

Several people looked up as she entered, with expectation, trepidation, and in a few cases, boredom, on their faces. There were about thirty people in the room, and she headed straight for the ten seated at one end of a long wooden table running perpendicular to the fireplace.

A tall, lean African-American man—or boy, more like—stood as she approached, one of his long legs getting caught between the table and the bench, which almost caused him to fall.

Despite the chill in the room, he was wearing a pair of black cargo pants and a white t-shirt with the word Supreme across the chest. About ten years ago, Lynn had worked undercover as a substitute psychology teacher at an elite private school in Philadelphia to try and get to the bottom of a p**********n ring that seemed to originate from inside the school. Jake vividly reminded her of the students she taught there.

“Are you a detective? Do you have any news about Shanna?” he asked his eyes wide and full of concern, but his tone curt and demanding. Entitled. Just like most of those students had been.

Lynn introduced herself and showed him her badge while a tall, lean blonde came to stand at his side. “And you are?”

“I’m Jake Hornby, the film’s director,” he said and offered his hand, which Lynn shook. He had a firm, steady handshake, the trustworthy kind. “And this is my girlfriend, Alicia West.”

He indicated the blonde, who took Lynn’s hand in a limp, sweaty hand. As the sleeves of her oversized sweater fell away with the motion, Lynn noticed several deep gouges on Alicia’s forearms, bright red and edged with even brighter red. They looked fresh. Could this be a simple case of female rivalry and jealousy? After seeing the state of Shanna’s body, Lynn doubted a woman would be capable of such brutality, but then again, she’d seen women do worse.

“When did you first notice Shanna had gone missing?” Lynn asked Jake.

“Two days ago. In the morning. She wasn’t there when we woke up,” he said.

“This was Tuesday morning then?” Lynn asked. “Before noon?”

“More like at four in the afternoon,” Alicia offered. A New York accent laced her words. Stress and anger often brought people’s accents to the forefront, Lynn found. “We’d been filming all night and didn’t get to sleep until dawn.”

Lynn nodded. “And you alerted the authorities right away?”

Jake shook his head. “We waited a couple of hours, figured she’d gone for a walk or something and would be back eventually. But then it was suddenly eight PM and we were supposed to start filming, and she still wasn’t there. We called her a few times, but she didn’t answer. She had the main role in the film, I was so pissed that she’d just disappeared…”

His voice cracked and trailed off and he looked even more like a teenage boy as he cleared his voice.

“She’d taken Jake’s laptop and probably went over the footage,” Alicia said with an edge in her voice. “She didn’t like how the shots were turning out, claimed they didn’t make her look pretty enough or something. Jake told her that it was his vision and his movie, and she didn’t like that. Personally, I thought she’d stormed off because of that. We weren't happy with her.”

Jake laid his hand on his girlfriend’s shoulder. “She’s been killed, Alicia. You can lay off her.”

Alicia looked cowed for a split second, as she looked down at her scuffed yellow boots, but her eyes remained hard and defiant. There was definitely bad blood between her and Shanna. But bad enough to kill?

“So, you reported her missing to the Sheriff’s department that night,” Lynn said. “What happened next?”

“We waited and told the guy who showed up what happened,” Jake said.

“Did you look for her at all?”

“Sure, we came here, we took a walk around,” he said. “But we figured she wouldn’t go into the woods by herself. I even drove into town and asked around in the diner if anyone had seen her. No one had. Frankly, I was worried. Shanna was a total city girl. Didn’t even bring hiking boots on the trip, just a pair of stylish sneakers.”

He sounded sincere and the venomous, black look his girlfriend was giving him as he spoke told Lynn he probably was sincere. Jake had feelings for Shanna.

“Honestly, we figured she split,” Alicia said. “She didn’t like the movie we were making, and was too spoiled and entitled to actually tell us she was out. So she just slinked away.”

“Without taking any of her belongings?” Lynn asked.

“To make it look like she’d be back,” Alicia said. “A typical rich, spoiled girl move.”

She sounded like she was speaking from personal experience and Lynn decided she did not like her even a little bit.

“I didn’t agree with that,” Jake hastened to add, giving his girlfriend and worried sort of look out of the corner of his eyes. “Like I said, I went looking for her, and when we couldn’t find her and she didn’t come back by the next day, I insisted we call the cops.”

There was definitely nervousness in his voice, and the looks the rest of the crew were flashing at them looked worried too. If Alicia had assaulted Shanna, they would all know it.

“I didn’t think she’d just walk out on the production without telling me,” Jake added earnestly. “I was very afraid that something had happened to her.”

He looked very afraid now, glancing at Lynn, his girlfriend and the rest of his friends.

Lynn nodded and looked at the others. Most of them looked away.

“And you were all together for the rest of that day and night?” she asked.

They all nodded, including Jake and Alicia.

“We spent the night filming the scenes that Shanna was not in,” Alicia said.

“It was hard to concentrate, obviously,” Jake said. “On account of her being missing and all.”

Something about the way he said it sounded forced to Lynn, like he was just saying what he figured she wanted to hear. Maybe they’d all ganged up on Shanna, since she was an outsider who was messing up their project.

“But you were angry too, right?” Lynn said, deciding to push him. “I mean, your main actress just walked away in the middle of filming.”

Jake looked lost for a second, his eyes darting to Alicia and the rest of his crew, before settling back on Lynn’s. “Yeah,” he admitted. “It pissed me off. But this film isn’t all that important. It’s not my final project or anything.”

“It is important,” one of the crew interjected—a tall, dark-skinned man with the physique of a linebacker. “I need this grade to pass the class or I can just go back home if I don’t.”

He spoke with a Southern accent of some sort, which only grew heavier as he got more and more agitated.

“You said she was OK, that she’d come through, but all she did was complain and now this— " He stopped talking abruptly and fixed fearful, yet angry eyes on Lynn. “I mean… like that’s what I thought then… obviously I don’t now that she’s…”

“Alicia would’ve stepped in and taken Shanna’s role,” Jake said into the silence that followed. “We discussed all this. You know we’d still get the movie done.”

He choked and looked at Lynn, eyes wide in shock. “I mean, not now, obviously. She’d dead. But before… that’s what we discussed while she was gone. Alicia did already step in last night.”

“Makes sense,” Lynn said. “The show must go on.”

“Or something like that,” Jake said. “But I suppose it’s all over now.”

Lynn felt the front door open behind her, a gust of cold air hitting her square in the back and making it plainly obvious just how pleasantly warm the interior of this cabin actually was.

“Agent Rivers,” Deputy Tara Stone said tentatively as she reached her. “There’s something you should see.”

The woman’s cheeks were red with more than just wind chill and her eyes were wide, glassy and full of fear. Lynn nodded then turned back to the film crew.

“Please stay here,” she told them. “I will need to speak to you all again.”

“Can we at least go back to our cabins?” Alicia asked bitingly.

Lynn was aware that her bad attitude could simply be due to an inability to accept that a girl she’d worked with had been brutally murdered. Or was it the sign of something more? A psychopathic mind unable to feel remorse or empathy? The way Shanna had been killed, the way she had been tortured and her beauty destroyed, pointed strongly at it being the work of a psychopath. And a psychopath would have been able to keep ten people from telling anyone about it.

Lynn held Alicia’s gaze, as though she was trying to read the answers from the young woman’s cold blue eyes. The answer was that Lynn was jumping the g*n even thinking all this.

“Your cabins are being searched right now,” Deputy Stone answered Alicia’s questions. “So you will have to wait here a little longer.”

Alicia opened her mouth to protest, but Jake gripped her shoulder to silence her.

“We’ll be here,” he said and ignored the angry look she flashed him.

Lynn turned to Tara and asked her to lead the way. A part of her mind hoped that what they had found was the guy who did it, covered in blood and spewing his confession.

But this case would not be that simple, Lynn was sure.